Nostalgia

When I was first married we lived in Exeter, in a terrace on a hill overlooking the railway. We had a friend who was an avid trainspotter, so he liked to have coffee in the kitchen when he visited, and conversations would be interrupted by Chris leaping up and saying excitedly, "That's a 4030 Class II-type!" (trainspotters, I made that up; please don't email to tell me that it couldn't have been one of those in 1973 because they didn't run on that line after '70).

On my way home from Devon yesterday, the train stopped and sat for 5 minutes opposite our old kitchen window, while I indulged in nostalgia about long Sunday afternoons when we walked along the river and home past the Cathedral (I worked in the Close at that time). If you were lucky you might find a shop open to buy an ice-cream – Sundays, in those days existed in suspension from the rest of the week. You could buy an ice-cream or a Sunday paper, if you could find an open shop, but not a tin of cling peaches – and why, exactly, did they cling? And I'm afraid that we did eat such things. When I worked in a country pub we had something of a reputation for good, home-cooked lunches. We served a choice of two salads: lettuce, sliced tomato and cucumber, with your choice of roast ham or roast chicken. Alternatively, you could leave out the meat, replacing it with a hunk of french bread, a wodge of Cheddar and a pickled onion, in which case we called it a ploughman's. I can still pick a chicken carcase clean in record time, and we ate a lot of chicken soup. Somehow, I think we would have to make a lot more effort now, but I still cook a ham the same way, boiling it first then roasting it with a glaze: marmalade is my favourite, but OH does it by boiling first in ginger beer, then using crystallised ginger for the glaze, which is pretty good.

It was good to get back to my own dogs (my mother's Gordon Setter is very boisterous) and at 6 o'clock this morning I was presented with a cup of tea and The Bolter, who curled up beside me and kicked happily.

Below, for the sheer joy of it, and because I mentioned them in my last post, is a litter of Tamworth piglets.

Water, water everywhere...

Not a flood!

...and my digital camera is 350 miles away in Berwick. I have been in Devon over the weekend and it has rained almost without cease. Yesterday my mother and I went Christmas shopping and barely got home through the floods. Today – Sunday - they have gone down somewhat and, although the forecast was for more extreme weather tonight, that has been ameliorated and I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed that I will be able to get out to my 8.10 train tomorrow. I have meetings in London and will be unpopular and unhappy if I miss them.

In the meantime I have been a good and dutiful daughter, endlessly washing up, sewing leather patches on my stepfather's jacket, teaching my mother to use her new camera, deadheading the pelargoniums and being nice to the over-boisterous dog, with an ear on the rain all the while. Shortly I will list all the Morse videos in the drawing room, so that I can track down more, and see if I can make the DVD menu intelligible to those who are not computer literate (if not, I will request that next door's 12-year-old will come in and explain it).

I'm an indulged daughter, I'm ashamed to admit – my mother told her butcher I would be here for the weekend and he replied "Oh, you'll want a rib then." Embarrassing that my likes are quite so widely known, but the knowledge that tonight's dinner will be of beef reared in the lush green fields around this beautiful village is making my mouth water. I'm off now to make plum crumble, my stepfather likes a good pudding.

Written Sunday 5.30pm - I did get out on Monday morning!

“I’m on the train!”

Durham Cathedral (not quite the view from the train!)

Writing from the train again – so far this morning it’s quite quiet, but then this is not the early morning commuter service which I usually travel on. I’m feeling pretty indignant about trains nonetheless, since it has just been announced that fares will go up in January, and more than the rate of inflation. That will take a saver return between Berwick and London to over £100. And that’s only the beginning: fares on this line are set to rise 15% over inflation in the next seven years. No wonder people fly. A new runway is proposed for Edinburgh or Glasgow to cope with domestic flights, although train travel is vastly better for the environment. Yet upgrading the railway so that trains can travel at high speed for the whole of their journey is not a priority. As usual, we seem to be paying lip service to energy savings, in case the government loses votes by restricting people’s freedom to pollute.

Selfishly, of course, I don’t want people to travel by train. Well, I want numbers great enough to keep the level of service as it is, while not so many that trains are significantly busier. I have almost entirely given up travelling standard class. The seats are too uncomfortable, the carriages are so crowded that the proximity to your neighbour is almost unbearable. First Great Western, on which I travel regularly, has new rolling stock. More seats than ever have been crammed in, so that it’s like travelling by bus – there is no room to breathe, it seems, let alone wriggle. These days my travel habits are exacting: I book as far in advance as possible and always travel on the train booked, so that I can buy cheap first class tickets. Yet despite calculating everything to the last detail so that I can book the instant tickets are released, I can almost never get the cheapest option. But at least my dodgy hip is made no worse by a 3-hour plus journey, and I can get a significant amount of work done (or, in this case, play).

There, a train rant and I didn’t mention mobile phones once!

Goldengrove

In Tavistock Square Gardens on Thursday it was very hard to resist scuffing up the golden leaves that littered the ground. Three minuscule squirrels were busily collecting – nuts? large round brown objects, at any rate, but the trees are mostly plane, so I’m not at all sure. Late as I was for a meeting, I couldn’t stop to scuff or to look. I had arrived in London on Monday – Guy Fawkes – and was staggered by the noise of fireworks that went on all evening. How do pets bear it? Our dogs, used to shooting going on all around, were unfazed by the only fireworks they’ve ever heard, when our neighbours decided to have a bonfire party (and inadvertently burnt down a tree, putting an end, I suspect, to further junketings); my mother’s dog lives in a village, and suffers agonies every year, as whizzes and bangs go on night after night, culminating in the local firework display. He has a fertile imagination, too, and almost imperceptible – to humans - displays in distant Torbay are greeted with dismayed quivers. I feel for him, but am glad that our two are so phlegmatic.

Travel to London and back was made pleasurable by the beauty of this year’s autumn colour, which reminded me of another favourite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The sadness is somehow inherent in the shortening days and the crispness in the air, though I am much more cheerful since I no longer commute daily to Edinburgh, leaving home in the morning and arriving back in the evening in the dark.

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Northward bound

(written late evening 1 October)

Despite a day of unalleviated gloom, as I left Devon, through the train window and in London, it has, as I finally travel northwards and home, turned into one of those soft, clear evenings that is a pleasure. The fenlands stretch on either side, three geese flap lazily in a pink sky, and a skein of soft grey clouds presages night. By the time I reach Northumberland it will be dark, and only the flash of the lighthouse will tell me that I am on the last stage of my journey. Eight hours of travel today, and that pulse of light is as welcome as to any mariner.

The English countryside is soft and green, newly sown grass emerging from ploughed fields. Woods and copses loom dark against the sky, expanses of clear water, bespeckled with ducks, reflect a silvery light. It is dark enough now for a stand of birches to be white wands on a black filigree. I love Britain. It’s fashionable to decry it, to underestimate its sylvan beauty, but I travel its length and breadth, with leisure to gaze from carriage windows, and I love it. Flying back into London from Canada I think, “Thank God for hedges!”

I am privileged, I think, to have lived in so many wonderful parts of Britain: in the Highlands, massive and craggy, yet threaded with soft glens; on the edge of Dartmoor, where great grey rocks tumble amid the stream beds, captured by gnarled tree roots; in the southwest of Scotland, where the rain never stopped but every inch of the sheep-nibbled upland meadows was a jewelled carpet of microscopic wildflowers; Northumberland, where the sky goes on for ever and the boundary between the land and its legends is stretched thin.

For ten years I commuted daily to Edinburgh and every morning, as I watched the sea breaking along the cliffs, and every evening, as the Cheviot loomed on the homeward journey, I could feel my soul lift and my spirit being restored. Even in deepest winter there was that brief lighthouse beam, with its resonances of wave and spindrift, in the final moments before reaching home.

Now I work from home as much as possible, and the sea is a distant sparkle, but the Cheviot is omnipresent, even when enshrouded by mist, and the daily comings and goings are conducted by sparrows, not people. Some days, ensnared by email and telephone, I scarcely set foot outside, but the minutiae of country life continues around me, and I catch glimpses of it through the window. A wren foraging for insects in the ivy, a troop of partridge crooning to each other in the morning sunlight, a mother woodpecker feeding her offspring on peanuts - small pleasures, but they suffice.

Gerard Manley Hopkins knew about the beauty of the small, the generally unremarked:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty, 1918)

Summing up last week

Another week when there hasn't been much opportunity to write anything here, and not much reading to speak of either. A train journey to Leeds gave me the chance to mull over the first of the Forsyte Saga, A Man of Property, so that I am nearly ready to write about it, while the journey home was spent reading the Interlude between the first and second books. It focused on my favourite character and, although it was a re-read and I knew the outcome, I found it very moving.

The train journeys were noisy but uneventful. My first "proper" trip since June, it should help to prepare me for the imminent venture to London and Devon, and to the vicissitudes of monthly travel until next summer. As ever, I've enjoyed a longer period at home, and begun to think wistfully of self-employment and ways and means for never setting foot in London again. But as the Devon trips to visit elderly parents will continue indefinitely (DV), I may as well resign myself to the joys of the Tube, hot, crowded and sticky even in winter, and the long evenings in a hotel when suddenly reading doesn't seem like the most engaging pastime in the world, and going out to eat an insurmountable chore.

And then there is the packing, of course - doleful dogs skulking at my feet while I pile clothes, papers and laptop into the suitcase, and the dreadful decision: what shall I take to read? Four hours each way London, Devon another 3 hours there and back, 1 night in a hotel, 3 nights with the parents, who go to bed Very Early; there's WiFi on the London trains but I can't work for the whole journey. How many books is that? My room in Devon has an emergency collection: C.P. Snow, Arthur Ransome, Raymond Chandler, all of which can be drawn on in need, and there are a couple of oddments in the desk drawer at work. There are two more books in the Forsyte Saga in the volume I'm reading, so that's a definite, especially as it's good, slow reading. But I'll need something lighter, especially for the Devon train on Friday evening - that one's always a horror, full of people attached to little machines which make noises like canned wasps, so concentration is impossible (I plan to remember my own canned-wasp-machine but, as I won't turn it up in case of disturbing someone else, it's remarkably ineffective against intrusive insects).

The real agony over travel book choice is, what if I don't like one of them? This is a good argument for not taking library books away with you as you can't abandon them if you really hate them. However, we must look on the bright side (why, I've always wondered? it's not in my nature, I am essentially lugubrious): a walk to Charing Cross Road and the Murder One bookshop is not out of the question, and I have discovered that Persephone Books, discoverers of forgotten gems, has its bookshop serendipitously situated between the office and the dentist. Mustn't forget that the journey home has to be undertaken, too!

Wanderlust

My son pointed me to a blog containing the most wonderful photos of Alaska. They were taken by a young man called Sean Lunt, who spent three months there, flying over mountains and glaciers, lakes and islands. Some of his landings (in a supercub) must have been breathtaking, if not terrifying, but the results are beautiful and inspiring.

My stepfather flew (illicitly, I think) over the glaciers of British Columbia when he was sent to train pilots in Canada during the war; he talks wistfully of the landscapes he saw. My own experience is puny compared to these daring aviators, cocooned in the comfort of a ViaRail coach, as we snaked through the Rockies. We were served canapes while the conducter congratulated us on our good fortune; this was one of the very few days every year when the summit of Mount Robson was not shrouded by cloud. The snow cap of Canada's tallest mountain was flushed a delicate rose pink in the early November sunset, and I could not take my eyes from it.

The journey from Toronto to Vancouver took three days and one of the most magical moments was sitting curled up in my couchette the first night, curtains drawn to hide me from the others in the carriage, nose pressed to the window watching our engine up ahead forging its way through the falling snow, its lights illuminating a narrow path ahead of us. The next day, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, we made a request stop, and two people climbed down from the train to stand in the snow. I watched as they dwindled into the distance, two tiny figures in a snowfield, with no sign of civilisation.

Because it was some time ago, and I was - as ever - travelling alone, I spent my days in the observation car writing a diary to send home, around the long gaps while I watched the world pass. Nowadays, I would have had my laptop with me, and a digital camera. My photos of the mountains are mostly a blur, since we crossed the highest part of the Rockies in the late evening. But I did have my portable CD player and, as we crossed the Prairies one night, I watched the vast expanse of sky and stars unfold overhead to the sound of Tallis and Purcell.